Fracking: evil – or just another heavy industry?

Editor's note: This is the second part of a three-part series. The first part can be read here.

The recent State Department report that appears to signal coming U.S. approval of the Keystone XL pipeline from oil fields in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast stunned many environmentalists. For years, they’d described the pipeline as a gigantic catastrophe waiting to happen, not just one long oil pipeline in a world with plenty of oil pipelines. Never leaving their green bubble, they were amazed that the administration of a president they largely backed could implicitly dismiss their worst fears as alarmism.

Now – with the state of California just beginning a debate over whether it should exploit its huge reserves of shale oil with a newly improved form of drilling known as hydraulic fracturing – environmentalists are once again warning of apocalyptic results. But what few seem to understand, and what the media have rarely emphasized, is that the Obama administration dismisses their alarmism about “fracking” – just as it did with Keystone XL.

The same administration that is widely considered the most aggressive in environmental regulation of any in U.S. history has a documented record of agreeing with the long-standing conventional wisdom about fracking among Democratic and Republican administrations and regulators alike. That view: The process poses the same potential pollution risks as many heavy industries, but those risks can be controlled and minimized with proper oversight.

In denouncing fracking, critics invent straw men and pretend they are noble fighters wielding irrefutable facts against corporate greedheads. But in depicting fracking as evil, they never admit their real argument is with the Obama administration.

In hydraulic fracturing, high-powered streams of water laced with small amounts of sand and chemicals are aimed at underground rock formations that block access to oil and natural gas reserves. Pioneered by Halliburton in the late 1940s, fracking was used in 1 million wells for the next 60 years in the U.S. without garnering much attention.

In recent years, however, information technology and the use of horizontal drilling has transformed fracking from a modestly effective process into an extremely cost-effective method of reaching previously inaccessible oil and natural gas reserves. Vast computational power allows drillers to take the equivalent of MRIs of immense underground areas, allowing for much more precise use of water blasting.

The process keeps getting more precise, using increasingly less water (with recycling rates at 70 percent and going higher), while lessening collateral effects on underground rock formations that aren’t harboring energy reserves.

After decades of silence, environmentalists now argue that this underground drilling poses vast risks to the underground water table that provides much of the water Americans consume.

But fracking occurs a mile or deeper beneath the surface. Water tables are a few hundred feet below the surface, or less. There is a solid rock buffer separating drilling areas from groundwater aquifers.

What’s more, wells are built of steel and concrete and cemented in place – meaning their construction adds another buffer between energy production and water tables.

This is why the president’s first energy secretary, Steven Chu, said: “We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.”

This is why the MIT physicist the White House recently nominated to succeed Chu, Ernest Moniz, described the risks to water posed by fracking as “challenging but manageable.”

This is why the president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, told a House committee that she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

The most serious concerns were raised by a peer-reviewed Duke University study released in early 2011. The Duke study did not find that the chemicals used in fracking had contaminated the well water, refuting the most serious claim from environmental groups. But Duke researchers did find higher levels of methane in well water in areas in Pennsylvania and New York near natural-gas wells. While methane is not believed to be harmful to drink, high concentrations of it released in closed areas can cause explosions.

Energy industry officials responded by challenging the assumption that fracking was responsible for methane migrating from source rock toward the atmosphere, a naturally occurring phenomenon in regions with large underground shale formations. They said there were problems with poorly designed wells, but that regulators were already aggressively addressing the issue in Pennsylvania.

A U.S. Energy Department task force on the shale gas boom agreed with the view that this was a manageable problem. Its report, released in late 2011, called for methane emissions to be monitored, with smart and thorough regulation using uniform national technical standards.

Hydraulic fracturing’s other great downside, according to environmentalists, is that it supposedly causes earthquakes.

But a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey report concluded that’s simply not true. Wastewater wells, which have been used for decades to dispose of water used in oil and gas drilling, have long been linked to small-magnitude earthquakes. But there are 140,000 such wells in the U.S., and only a relative few have been linked to earthquakes. There is no evidence that the small earthquakes that have been generated have had a negative effect.

Evidence is what should drive U.S. regulation of fracking – not a bid to block it by any means necessary because it could derail green dreams that fossil fuels will disappear.

There are few people in America with more credibility on energy issues than MIT physical chemist John Deutch, who served in key posts in the Carter and Clinton administrations and who was asked by the White House to oversee the shale gas task force. In a 2011 Washington Post essay, he wrote that data-driven regulation of fracking’s use in oil and gas exploration would not only provide proper safeguards, it would result in “a continuous improvement in environmental outcomes.”

Deutch noted that the benefits that stood to be gained weren’t just in job creation and the economic multiplier effect. He cited the plunging costs of energy in areas where utilities suddenly had access to abundant – and far cheaper – natural gas. He described the national-security benefits of reducing reliance on natural gas imports from nations such as Russia and Iran.

His conclusion: “The emergence of the North American shale-gas resource is the most positive event in the U.S. energy outlook in 50 years.”

This is a view based on evidence – not on a quasi-religious hatred of fossil fuels. This is a view based on the gigantic success fracking has already had in creating jobs and wealth in America – not on the self-serving claims of the crony-capitalist, subsidy-craving alternative-energy industrial complex.

And then there’s this delicious irony: Allegedly evil fracking has done far more to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions than the renewable sources of energy that environmentalists so admire. Such emissions hit a 20-year low in the U.S. in 2012 – because of the giant recent shift from coal to natural gas.

Which brings us back to California, home to the nation’s largest shale resource and the nation’s most fervent environmentalists. Here the question is whom our leaders will heed: the Obama administration or the green true believers.

Next Sunday, we will conclude our series on the U.S. energy revolution with a look at how another populous state with a crafty veteran Democratic governor dealt with fracking and shale, to the vast benefit of the people he was elected to serve. And we’ll lay out what the stakes are for California, depending on whether we join the revolution – or opt out.